Authors

Born in 1917 and educated at Hounslow College, Ralph joined the editorial staff of Sporting Life in 1934, but later went into banking. Meanwhile, he had begun writing, and several of his sketches and scenes were produced in West End Revue.

Ralph joined the RAF in 1940 as a wireless operator/air-gunner and progressed his military career until 1961 when he retired voluntarily from the RAF to write full time. He was a frequent contributor of feature stories to the Sunday Express.

When the passenger liner City of Benares sailed from Liverpool on Friday, 13 September 1940, she was carrying 90 evacuee children from the bombed cities of Britain, bound under a government-sponsored scheme for a safe haven in Canada. Her sinking by U-boat four days later, without warning, in total disregard of the plight of survivors and in defiance of international law, shocked and horrified the civilised world.

In the balmy summer of 1940, the most critical battle of the Second World War was fought out over the fields and towns of southern England.

An embattled but resilient people could look only to the young men whose task it was to repel the aerial invasion. In this book Ralph Barker has unearthed twelve untold or little-known but unforgettable stories of men whose names may be unfamiliar but without whose selfless tenacity Britain would not have survived.